As governments and individuals struggle with growing indebtedness, the topic of debt itself – what it is, what it means, and how we understand it – has never been more salient. This collection brings together a range of contributions from many disciplines and around the world to consider debt through various lenses, including design, art, technology, political economy, social justice, surveillance, protest, education, urban and virtual spaces, and more. Aiming not just to advance scholarship, but to push ahead real change in the world, the book offers not only analytical insights and conceptual apparatuses, but practical tools and radical inspirations as well. A powerful analysis of a concept that has become ever more central to everyday society, InDEBTed to Intervene will be essential reading for scholars and citizens alike.

A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist “new economy” through the political lens of the debtor/creditor relation. "The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor." —from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies. Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

Wiedemann reveals how the rise of financial markets as private alternatives to welfare states transforms social rights and responsibilities.

Acts of Intervention traces the ways in which performance and theatre have participated in and informed the larger cultural politics of race, sexuality, citizenship and AIDS in the United States in the last fifteen years.

An argument that under capitalism, debt has become infinite and unpayable, expressing a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Experts, pundits, and politicians agree: public debt is hindering growth and increasing unemployment. Governments must reduce debt at all cost if they want to restore confidence and get back on a path to prosperity. Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis, however, is completely different: under capitalism, debt is not primarily a question of budget and economic concerns but a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Debt has become infinite and unpayable. It disciplines populations, calls for structural reforms, justifies authoritarian crackdowns, and even legitimizes the suspension of democracy in favor of “technocratic governments” beholden to the interests of capital. The 2008 economic crisis only accelerated the establishment of a “new State capitalism,” which has carried out a massive confiscation of societies' wealth through taxes. And who benefits? Finance capital. In a calamitous return to the situation before the two world wars, the entire process of accumulation is now governed by finance, which has absorbed sectors it once ignored, like higher education, and today is often identified with life itself. Faced with the current catastrophe and the disaster to come, Lazzarato contends, we must overcome capitalist valorization and reappropriate our existence, knowledge, and technology. In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato confronts a wide range of thinkers—from Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault to David Graeber and Carl Schmitt—and draws on examples from the United States and Europe to argue that it is time that we unite in a collective refusal of this most dire status quo.

In this illuminating work on external debt, Daniel Cohen explodes many myths currently popular among economists, bankers, and journalists about the nature of the debt problem, its origins, and its cure.